Plaintiff
Dawn Campbell (“plaintiff”) has sued her former
spouse, Kenneth Campbell (“defendant”), and his
company, Campbell Professional Services LLC (“the
company”) for defamation.[1] Defendant has moved to dismiss
for lack of personal jurisdiction pursuant to Rule 12(b)(2)
of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In the alternative,
he moves pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a) to transfer the
venue to the District of Minnesota.[2] For the reasons below, the
motion is denied.

I.

Plaintiff's
complaint alleges that she and defendant divorced in 2004. In
July 2015, she moved from Minnesota to Illinois to take a job
with Inland Real Estate Investment Corporation
(“Inland”). In January 2016, defendant sent a
series of emails to Inland containing allegedly defamatory
statements about plaintiff. Defendant states (and plaintiff
does not dispute) that he authored and sent the messages from
Shoreview, Minnesota. Among other things, the emails state
that plaintiff had previously “sold securities without
a license for many years” and had “perpetrated
fraud against [i]nvestors” while working for a former
employer. See Compl. Ex. D. Defendant also stated
that plaintiff was a “bad gambler, ” was
“not creditworthy, ” and was a “high-risk
person.” Id. The first of the messages was
submitted to Inland via Inland's website. Two subsequent
messages were sent directly to the email account of
plaintiff's superior, Rod Curtis (“Curtis”).
In addition, defendant sent complaints about plaintiff to the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial
Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Defendant does not
deny sending the messages. He denies that the statements are
defamatory, however, because he claims that they are true.

II.

A.
Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Personal Jurisdiction

Defendant
first argues that plaintiff's complaint should be
dismissed because this court lacks personal jurisdiction over
him and his company. “The plaintiff has the burden of
establishing personal jurisdiction, and where, as here, the
issue is raised by a motion to dismiss and decided on the
basis of written materials rather than an evidentiary
hearing, the plaintiff need only make a prima facie showing
of jurisdictional facts.” Tamburo v. Dworkin,
601 F.3d 693, 700 (7th Cir. 2010). At this stage, therefore,
I “take as true all well-pleaded facts alleged in the
complaint and resolve any factual disputes in the affidavits
in favor of the plaintiff.” Id.[3]

“Courts
recognize two types of personal jurisdiction: general and
specific.” Kipp v. Ski Enter. Corp. of
Wisconsin, 783 F.3d 695, 697 (7th Cir. 2015).
“General jurisdiction is ‘all-purpose'; it
exists only ‘when the [party's] affiliations with
the State in which suit is brought are so constant and
pervasive as to render it essentially at home in the forum
State.'” Id. (quoting Daimler AG v.
Bauman, 134 S.Ct. 746, 751 (2014)). “Specific
jurisdiction is case-specific; the claim must be linked to
the activities or contacts with the forum.”
Id.

Here,
plaintiff argues only that the court has specific personal
jurisdiction over defendant. Specific personal jurisdiction
is established where three conditions are met: “(1) the
defendant must have purposefully availed himself of the
privilege of conducting business in the forum state or
purposefully directed his activities at the state; (2) the
alleged injury must have arisen from the defendant's
forum-related activities; and (3) the exercise of
jurisdiction must comport with traditional notions of fair
play and substantial justice.” Felland v.
Clifton, 682 F.3d 665, 673 (7th Cir. 2012) (citations
omitted). I consider each of these requirements in turn.

1.
Purposeful Direction

The
Seventh Circuit has “distilled three requirements ...
for determining whether conduct was purposefully directed at
the forum state: (1) intentional conduct (or intentional and
allegedly tortious conduct); (2) expressly aimed at the forum
state; (3) with the defendant's knowledge that the
effects would be felt -- that is, the plaintiff would be
injured -- in the forum state.” Id. at 674-75
(quotation marks omitted).

These
requirements are met here. There can be no question that
defendant acted intentionally in composing and sending the
emails. It is likewise clear that defendant's conduct was
expressly aimed at Illinois. He sent the emails directly to
Inland, which is located in Illinois. And defendant knew (or
at least intended) that plaintiff would be injured in
Illinois. Cf. Compl. Ex. B, Email from Kenneth
Campbell to Dawn Campbell (Jan. 25, 2016) (“[A] good
fate for you would be panhandling on the streets of Chicago.
Then you could compete with rats like you.”). The
purpose of his messages was clearly to bring her into
disrepute with her employer and to get her fired.

Defendant
argues that his conduct was not expressly directed toward
Illinois because he did not know where Curtis lived or where
he would open the emails. See Defs.' Mot. to
Dismiss, Ex. B, Kenneth Campbell Aff. ¶ 14 (“As to
the communications and emails I sent to Inland Real Estate
Corporation, I had no personal knowledge as to where those
communications or emails would be received or opened by Rod
Curtis or any other representative of Inland Real Estate
Corporation.”). He argues that under Advanced
Tactical OrdnanceSystems, LLC v. Real Action
Paintball, Inc., 751 F.3d 796 (7th Cir. 2014), the fact
that the email might have been opened anywhere means that he
did not expressly aim his conduct at Illinois. Advanced
Tactical was a trademark infringement suit in which the
defendant, Real Action, was alleged to have sent two
misleading emails to a list of subscribers. The plaintiff
argued that specific personal jurisdiction could be exercised
over Real Action in Indiana based on the fact that Indiana
residents were among the emails' recipients. The court
disagreed, stating:

The fact that Real Action maintains an email list to allow it
to shower past customers and other subscribers with
company-related emails does not show a relation between the
company and Indiana. Such a relation would be entirely
fortuitous, depending wholly on activities out of the
defendant's control. As a practical matter, email does
not exist in any location at all; it bounces from one server
to another, it starts wherever the account-holder is sitting
when she clicks the “send” button, and it winds
up wherever the recipient happens to be at that instant. The
connection between the place where an email is opened and a
lawsuit is entirely fortuitous. We note as well that it is
exceedingly common in today's world for a company to
allow consumers to sign up for an email list. We are not
prepared to hold that this alone demonstrates that a
defendant made a substantial connection to each state (or
country) associated with those persons' “snail
mail” addresses.”

Id. at 803.

The
communications in this case bear little similarity to those
in Advanced Tactical. Inland was not one of a long
list of email recipients located throughout the country.
Defendant sent the messages in question specifically and
(with the exception of the SEC and FINRA complaints)
exclusively to Inland. His contact with Illinois was not
fortuitous and was entirely within his control. The bare
possibility that Curtis might have opened and read the emails
in another state does nothing to change this fact. See,
e.g., Felland, 682 F.3d at 676 n.3 (“Of
course, email accounts can generally be accessed in any
state, so it may not make much sense to say that they were
sent to a Wisconsin address. Nevertheless ... [defendant]
purposefully sent these emails to Wisconsin residents knowing
that they would most likely be read and have their effect in
Wisconsin. This manner of communication is similar to mailed
letters or telephone calls, so the emails are properly
considered as contributing to [defendant's] minimum
contacts with the forum state.”) (quotation marks
omitted). In any case, while two of the defamatory emails
were sent to Curtis's email account, the first was
submitted to Inland directly via Inland's website. Thus,
even if Curtis might have accessed or opened the emails in a
location other than Illinois, there is no reason to believe
that the first message was opened anywhere other than
Illinois.[4]

I
conclude that the purposeful-direction requirement is met
here.

2.
Defendant's Forum-Related Activities

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Specific
personal jurisdiction is proper only where the
&ldquo;relation between the defendant and the forum [arises]
out of contacts that the defendant himself creates
with the forum.... Contacts between the plaintiff or other
third parties and the forum do not satisfy this
requirement.&rdquo; Advanced Tactical, 751 F.3d at
801 (citation and quotation marks omitted). Here,
defendant&#39;s contact with Illinois resulted from his own
actions. This is not a case in which a defendant posted
defamatory statements on a website that was accessed through
the online activity of others. See, e.g.,
Shrader v. Biddinger, 633 F.3d 1235, 1241 (10th Cir.
2011) (&ldquo;The maintenance of a web site does not in and
of itself subject the owner or operator to personal
jurisdiction, even for actions relating to the site, simply
because it can be accessed by residents of the forum
state.&rdquo;). Nor is this a case in which the
defendant&#39;s emails were originally received in other
states or locations and subsequently forwarded to Illinois.
See, e.g., Headstrong Corp. v. Jha, No.
CIVA 305CV813-HEH, 2007 WL 1238621, at *4 (E.D. Va. Apr. 27,
2007) (no personal jurisdiction where defamatory emails were
not expressly directed at Virginia, but instead were merely
...

Our website includes the first part of the main text of the court's opinion.
To read the entire case, you must purchase the decision for download. With purchase,
you also receive any available docket numbers, case citations or footnotes, dissents
and concurrences that accompany the decision.
Docket numbers and/or citations allow you to research a case further or to use a case in a
legal proceeding. Footnotes (if any) include details of the court's decision. If the document contains a simple affirmation or denial without discussion,
there may not be additional text.

Buy This Entire Record For
$7.95

Download the entire decision to receive the complete text, official citation,
docket number, dissents and concurrences, and footnotes for this case.